Penenberg - Play at work: how games inspire breakthrough thinking

O ver the years, Ian Bogost has developed a colorful palette of interactive games, although probably not the kind youre accustomed to playing. As a game designer and professor of digital media and interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Bogost is the antithesis to profit-hungry entertainment behemoths such as Electronic Arts, creating games as a mode of expression for social, political, and artistic commentary, and not so much for commercial gain.

For instance, in Jetset, which Bogost released through his company, Persuasive Games, a player assumes the role of TSA screeners at an airport and deals with angry passengers and ever-more-complicated rules (shirts are banned, then cell phones) until the line grinds to a halt and hes fired. Simony, rendered predominately in Latin, is a combination art installation and iPhone/iPad game that addresses the role of belief and religion in a technological, secular world. Bogost has released games that feature snippy Kinkos employees serving irate customers, tomato growers confronting E. coli outbreaks, and dieters forced to manage their menus on ever-leaner budgets. The ingenious Oil God seeks to explore the ties that bind geopolitics, gas prices, and oil profits. Wreak havoc on the worlds oil supplies by unleashing war and disaster, reads the promotional copy that Bogost penned. Bend governments and economies to your will to alter trade practices. Your goal? Double consumer gasoline prices in five years using whatever means necessary: start wars, overthrow leaders, spawn natural disasterseven beckon the assistance of extraterrestrial overlords.

Given his approach to game design, you shouldnt be surprised to learn that Bogost despises gamification: the integration of gamelike elements into nongame activities. The way he sees it, over the past few years gamification has become the it girl of business, spawning conferences and a hefty dose of me-too-ism as some companies, eager to embrace it, tack on points or badges to just about any mundane activity to trick employees into thinking its actually fun. That way theyll complete it more quickly and efficiently. Meanwhile, marketers use it in an attempt to get us to buy more stuff. Think Tropicana, which tried rewarding frequent orange juice drinkers with redeemable points. You might call that lame-ification.

Bogost dismisses gamification as exploitationware, a grifters game, pursued to capitalize on a cultural moment, and to bring about results meant to last only long enough to pad [gamification proponents] bank accounts before the next trend comes along. It gives Vice Presidents and Brand Managers comfort: theyre doing everything right, and they can do even better by adding a games strategy to their existing products, slathering on gaminess like aioli on ciabatta at the consultants indulgent sales lunch.

The mellifluously acerbic Bogost also aims his ire at social game makers such as Zynga, which he dubbed the Wall Street hedge-fund guys of games for its purveyance of uncreative, unchallenging experiences. Bogosts own games also have players engage in uncreative, unchallenging work and game play, too, but thats precisely his point. He views them as tools to educate, to show players how the other half lives, to embrace the mundane and disrupt and change fundamental attitudes and beliefs about the world, leading to potentially-significant long-term social change. His videographic work, like Jetset and Oil God, are more performance art than commercial product, and few outside a cadre of gamesian academics have actually played them. But that changed when Bogost shined his critical klieg lights on Zyngas Farmville, which requires players to return over and over to water plants that would otherwise die. Bogost feared this behaviorist experiment with rats, as he told CNET, arguing that Zyngas designers were exploiting peoples compulsions. If there were a deeper, more critical artistic or social aspect to Zyngas games, that would be one thing. Bogost found it maddening that the company was simply in it for the money.

On his blog he railed against the whole idea of social games, where friends arent really friends; they are mere resources, and not just resources for the player, but also for the game developer, who relies on insipid, viral aspects of a design to make a system replicate. The makers of these games build compulsion into their design and the play acts themselves are rote. If a player gets stuck, he can buy his way to the next level. Whats worse, Social games so covet our time that they abuse us while we are away from them, through obligation, worry, and dread over missed opportunities. They not only waste our time when we play them, they also destroy the time we spend away from them.

Instead of merely talking about it, though, Bogost decided to make a statement with a satire that would deploy the same inane, albeit addictive, hooks as Farmville. The result: Cow Clicker, a Facebook game he unveiled at a Social Games on Trial seminar held at NYU in 2010.

Ill let Bogost describe it:

Its a Facebook game about Facebook games. Its partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of todays social games, and partly an earnest example of that genre. You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom premium cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called mooney), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence.

Bogost made Cow Clicker extra social by allowing each player to invite eight others to join his pasture, and whenever someone clicked on a cow, everybody would receive a point (adding incentive, savvy that?). A leaderboard tracked the clickiest cow clickers.

Then something remarkable happened. His parody of a game became a hit. It started with those in on the joke playing for the love of irony, but quickly spread well beyond. Soon tens of thousands of players were feverishly clicking on Bogosts bovines, and most werent in on the joke. Perhaps he shouldnt have been surprised. He had intended Cow Clicker to ape Farmvilleinane, insipid, insultingly easyexcept his was a practical joke made at the expense of its players, while Zyngas designers produced theirs for commercial gain. Their ends might have diverged, but their means didnt.